NO FRIEND OF DEMOCRACY

AUTOR: Edith Moore, Joseph Mccabe

PREFACE
TO the student of History the struggle which now wraps the globe in the flames of war and hatred is not a tragic and mysterious revelation of new forces or new diseases. It is the inevitable further, perhaps final, phase of a struggle that has reddened Europe since it awoke from the slumbers of the Dark Age. First, the rights of man against the privileges of priests had to be vindicated, and freedom of conscience was at last born amidst the ruins of the Thirty Years' War. Then the rights of man against the usurped privileges of corrupt rulers and their hireling politicians had to be won; and from I789 to the recent days, when we allowed or encouraged alien Powers to force despotism for the sixth time upon the people of Spain, more than a million men, women, and even children died to secure them. But the struggle was inconclusive. All privileges based upon the exploitation of others -- the privileges of wealth, of nobility, of royal or bureaucratic power -- must sooner or later be challenged.

The tragic irony of this phase of the struggle is that it was inaugurated by a group of rogues who, to their own amazement, successfully perpetrated the most colossal swindle that is recorded in history. The Hitlers and Mussolinis, meeting over slopping tables, had at first a hope that was modest in comparison with that of the Tammany politicians who once captured New York. They were astonished when representatives of industrial wealth, of noble landowners, of high military commands, of palaces and churches, came whispering to them. They were to be the White Knights of Privilege: to be suitably rewarded and disbanded when " Bolshevism " was extinct. The crooks enlarged their plans until they had behind them an organised greed, a massive brain trust devising plans to restore half the world to serfdom and profitable service to themselves. England, France and America looked on for years, applauding their " efficiency," their " order and discipline "; and particularly their promise to make a final end of the churlish folk who talk about the rights of the people. Now...

What part had the Roman Church in this conspiracy? And how has it adjusted itself to wrest an increase of its power from the new form which the struggle has taken? We teach history in so emasculated a version in our schools today that now not one man in a hundred knows the ghastly part which it played in the bludgeoning of democracy in the last century, to say nothing of earlier centuries. We teach children that the Inquisition was a gentle tribunal demanded by "princes and peoples" for their own protection. We say that the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War were symptoms of social conditions which have passed away. We do not tell them one word about the savagery which the Church blessed in Italy, Spain and Portugal from 1794 to -- in the case of Spain --1941, though we tell them a hundred lies about the French and Russian Revolutions. And our organs of public instruction are so cajoled and intimidated by secretly working Catholic societies that we are honestly puzzled. Leopold, Petain and Weygand are fanatical Catholics, we learn. Strange that the worst traitors to civilization should be the most docile subjects of the Vatican. The Pope has forbidden the German bishops to publish the congratulations they have prepared for the wicked Hitler at his triumph. The Italian hierarchy talk about England in the language of Gayda. The Catholic weeklies in England admit sadly that one of the strongest elements of isolationism and Anglophobia in America is the Catholic Church. And soon...

Read this book. It is not a rhetorical outburst. It is not even an attempt to discover what is behind the veil. It is a cold statement of facts, mainly on Catholic Authority. Miss Moore has diligently, sagaciously, temperately brought together the scattered admissions which circumstances and events have at times elicited. You may draw your own conclusions.